Towards Rashtrapati Bhavan

I am used to hyperbole during election campaigns. But it is unusual
to see such a vigorous campaign for the Presidency of India. [There have been contests but never open campaigning on the
present scale.]

So what are the major claims being made for the two contenders? Two
comments being made for A P J Abdul Kalam are that he is a
'great scientist' and that he is 'the father of India's nuclear
weapons programme.' As for Lakshmi Sehgal, her Left Front campaign
managers drum away that she is 'the first woman candidate for India's
highest office' and that she is a 'freedom fighter' of the Netaji
vintage.

So where does one begin examining these claims? I would start by
quoting Richard Feynman, the maverick American Nobel laureate who
worked on the Manhattan Project [the race to build the first atomic
weapons] during World War II. He was asked what he thought of that
enterprise. 'It wasn't science,' Feynman answered, 'it was mostly
engineering.'

Feynman was one of the most brilliant minds of the past
half a century. His work in quantum electrodynamics -- the interaction
between light and matter -- changed our understanding of the universe
at a fundamental level. And that is what a 'great scientist' does --
altering our perception in some basic way. And that is what Abdul
Kalam has never done. To call him 'an Indian Einstein' is such piffle
that I am forced to wonder what they are teaching in Indian schools.

India's next President -- his victory is guaranteed -- is not a
scientist. He is an engineer -- a man who has grasped the
groundbreaking theories propounded by true scientists, and then put
them to some practical use. It is a perfectly honourable task, indeed
an essential one. And Feynman -- one of the few people to be both a
great scientist and a great engineer -- was not being in the least
disrespectful when he ruminated aloud on the Manhattan Project. That
is why Dr Oppenheimer, rather than, say, Albert Einstein, was named
the father of the first atom bomb.

I am hard put to name any purely scientific field where Abdul
Kalam has blazed a trail. So, why then is everybody eager to pin the
'great scientist' tag upon him?

Next, is he really the father of India's thermonuclear devices? Going
through Abdul Kalam's resume, I find that he specialised in
aeronautics and that his subsequent work for the Government of India
was in missile technology. Missiles may or may not be used to deliver
a nuclear punch, but that does not make Abdul Kalam 'the father
of the Indian thermonuclear bomb.' That honour should go to Dr R
Chidambaram and his team, the forgotten men of Pokharan-II.

Actually, Abdul Kalam's work stands alone without need of
embellishment. India has long been subject to a harsh missile
technology embargo. This left Indian engineers struggling to build
everything from scratch [a hurdle never faced by Pakistan which could
depend on Chinese technology delivered via North Korea]. Six of every
ten missiles designed by Abdul Kalam's team seemed to go awry or
fall into the sea, but the wonder is that India has any missiles at
all. Building a credible missile defence programme is a solid
achievement in itself.

But we should not turn a blind eye to the flaws in the Indian defence
research community. There were audible sighs of relief in Delhi when
a contingent of Russian tanks arrived last month. It was a telling
fact, testimony to the fact that India's own advanced tank programme
is woefully behind schedule. The armed forces are also starved of
other advanced equipment. [Do we really have to depend on Israel or
the United States for sensors?]

Let us now turn to Colonel Lakshmi Sehgal, another civilian best
remembered for her brush with the armed forces. I find the arguments
raised on her behalf -- about her being a woman and a freedom fighter
in Netaji's Indian National Army -- very curious. They would be
perfectly correct if she herself says so, but they sound weird coming
from a Communist mouth.

Take for instance that claim about striking a blow for gender
equality by proposing a woman's name to Rashtrapati Bhavan for the
first time. Tell me something: how many women are there in the
CPI-M Politburo, that party's highest decision-making body? And
how many women has the party made chief minister of Kerala [a state
where women outnumber men]? The answer, in both cases, is zero!

Pardon me, Comrades, but isn't that rank hypocrisy? No more so, of
course, than taking refuge in Netaji's name...

Let me refresh Colonel Sehgal's memory by quoting what Subhas Chandra
Bose himself said in 1930: 'The Moscow Communists are a serious
menace to the growth of healthy trade unionism in India and we cannot
possibly leave the field to them...we shall also fight the domination
of Moscow in the affairs of India, for we are convinced that only
thereby can we serve the best interests of India.' In turn the CPI
-- there was no CPI-M in those days -- attacked the Indian National
Army as 'Quislings' and 'tools of the Fascists.' All because they
were fighting the British, who were allied to Communist Russia!

Faced with this fact, Colonel Sehgal offered the curious explanation
that the Communists -- she failed to specify which sect -- had
understood Bose's position accurately after the party split in 1964.
Perhaps she merely meant that it takes Communists 20 years to
realise the 'historic blunders' -- to use Jyoti Basu's felicitous
phrase -- which they have committed!

There are plenty of reasons to vote for either Abdul Kalam or Sehgal, the primary one being that both are fundamentally
decent human beings. Don't diminish the khadi of genuine achievement by cloaking it in tawdry tinsel.